1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to information appliance performance measurement technology, and more particularly, to a method and apparatus for measuring the performance of an information appliance by means of a SoC (system-on-card) calculation unit.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Unlike general-purpose computer devices, an appliance is typically designed to serve a specific purpose or provide a specific service and thus is more robust. Compared with general-purpose computer devices, “appliances” are relatively “closed”—their specific operating systems and applications (or drivers) vary with their intended purposes and services.
An appliance, such as an access point, a digital TV set-top box, or a network file-sharing server, performs a specific transaction for serving a specific purpose. For sophisticated appliances, please refer to IBM® WebSphere® DataPower Series SOA Appliances or Tivoli® ISS Appliances® (“IBM,” “WebSphere,” and “Tivoli” are registered trademarks in the possession of International Business Machine in the United States and/or other countries).
In general, an information appliance can function as a reverse proxy capable of load balance, cache and data encryption, and adapted to send data from a user-end to a backend application on a network server at a back-end. One of the most frequently asked questions is about how to evaluate a transaction system achieving maximum throughput (transaction quantity per second.) However, the performance of an information appliance depends on the overall performance of the transaction system infrastructure and the payload of an input message. Thus, the performance of a series of systems equals that of the weakest one of the systems. If an infrastructure architecture does not match the performance of the information appliance, then the performance of the information appliance cannot be actually measured during a test. As a result, the performance of the information appliance cannot be assessed until the infrastructure architecture similar to a target environment is created. Thus, the construction process of the infrastructure architecture for use in performance testing is time-consuming and resource-consuming.
Hence, it is desirable to provide a solution that receives input samples for a client but dispenses with creating an infrastructure architecture of performance testing. Furthermore, the solution should be configured such that if an information appliance simulates dynamic states (such as packet loss and latency) of the infrastructure architecture, measurement results will approximate to a measured value in the clients' actual environment.